Joshua Tree National Park

The last few days we have been at Joshua Tree National Park.  We should have known we would not have Internet service, or TV, or cell phone service, so that's why no blog from me for the last few days.  We saw and did so much and I took over 100 pictures the last few days, but this will be a condensed version.

Joshua Tree

This is a beautiful park, with desert, mountains, Joshua Tree forest, and spectacular views.  We did a lot of hiking to see geographical and historical sights.

Gold Mine

I wish the photographs could portray the awesomeness of what we saw. The picture below shows just a small portion of what we were looking at.  The haze in the valley is due to moisture, dust, and smog from Los Angeles.  This was a "clear" day.  If you look in the center of the picture, there is long ridge in the valley floor.  This is part of the San Andreas fault, the one that will probably break California off into the ocean some day, so they say.  1906 was the year of the big quake that did a lot of damage. We tried to drive down to see it closer, but there are no roads.  You can hire a jeep tour in Palm Springs if you want, but we didn't.  

San Andreas Fault Line

Down in the desert, not in the park, near the Salton Sea, a man by the name of  Leonard Knight, who discovered God after a life-altering event in 1967, created Salvation Mountain.  He has been building and painting on this since 1985, and just recently moved into a care facility.  Up until now he had been living in his painted-up truck here at Salvation Mountain.  We had to go see it.  Very interesting.

Salvation Mountain

An art truck near by

A popular thing to do in the desert is to go off-road.  We met a caravan of 10 Volkswagen off-road vehicles.  What fun!  

Back to the campground.  It's a beautiful place to camp, however, at the top of a mountain there are no services, no Internet, TV, electricity, water, or sewer dump, but for the $5 it cost us we didn't complain.  The weather had been cool which was perfect for all the hikes we had been doing.  But then we woke up to all this snow in the morning.  

Snow in the morning!  

 We had to wait until the Park Service cleared and re-opened the roads before we could leave the mountain and then we moved to a RV park in the town of Twentynine Palms near the entrance to Joshua Tree National Park.  It's a bit warmer here, and now we have civilization again.

Twentynine Palms Resort

Oh, I almost forgot to mention, one of the first things we saw when we got to the park was this poster about the killer bees in the area.  Fortunately we did not see any.

Killer Bees Alert